


Going On Twenty, Going On Fifty, Going On

by Trovia



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Backstory, Ensemble Cast, F/M, Forced Prostitution, Gen, Nightmares, Other, Psychological Trauma, Sexual Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-17
Updated: 2012-12-17
Packaged: 2017-11-21 09:54:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/596369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trovia/pseuds/Trovia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It hurts a little less each time, or so Finnick believes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Going On Twenty, Going On Fifty, Going On

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sabaceanbabe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabaceanbabe/gifts).



> This was written for the prompt, "A Question Of Time," a song by Depeche Mode.

Last year’s winner Aideen McLane is walking out of the Training Center with heels so high they could be used to kill, red and green colors artfully smeared around her eyes. Finnick can see, through her transparent skirt, that she’s naked underneath.

Looks like Aideen played the knowing smirks a little too well at her Games.

Finnick just returns to the drink he’s been nursing all night. 

He’s twenty-three.

\--- 

The first time… hurts. 

It really, really hurts.

Towards the end in his Games, his cheek had been sliced open by a dagger, actually sliced _open_ ( _the Capitol had held its breath to see if it would scrub off well_ ), but this is… nothing like that. Everybody has been telling him he’s beautiful, but he hasn’t grown into his limbs at all, and this is tearing him _apart._

His face is hot from shame of something being shoved _in there_. He’s possibly crying. The edge of the tabletop is poking his thighs; there’ll be bruises, but he already fears that those will come off clean in remake, too. 

Finnick is sixteen. He had no idea that men can be together this way, an hour prior.

\--- 

District One’s Crystal Pond leaves with excitement in her eyes, ocean green satin robes reaching all the way down to the ground. She returns with a bruise the shape of a hand on her throat, one of her eyes swollen shut. She takes up breeding mice mutts as a talent and always carries one of them around in her sleeve, talking to it in the voice of a child. They first sold her at fifteen, for one reason or another.

District Five’s Adriane Cane is forty-eight and a mother of two. Nobody knows who’d pay for her now and why, after she’d been safe back home so many years. There’s no expression on her face when she leaves; there’s still none when she comes back. Neither of her sons is called at Reaping Day.

“It starts hurting less after a while,” Finnick promises Corin from District Two one night on the roof. He’s nineteen, and three days. 

Gloss and Cashmere Jenkins leave the lift together. 

District Two’s Brutus is called exactly once a year, stays away for exactly one week, and spends another two days in remake to have the ever same bones set. 

When it’s Johanna Mason’s turn, she never shows up. 

Haymitch swears and tries to track her down, sloshing whiskey all over his sleeve, but Finnick doesn’t need the growing sense of dread in his stomach to know that it’s too late. She had a father and a sister and two cats, he knows.

At the rescheduled appointment, Johanna wears bright red mascara, and an excuse of a skirt.

\--- 

“No,” he says and catches Annie’s hand before she can unbutton his pants. 

She stops, questioning look on her face.

Finnick hesitates. 

“Give me a month?” he asks.

_Give me a life._

\---

Finnick is fourteen-and-a-half and he’s resting his head on Mags‘ lap. In the dead of night, he’s walked all the way across the Village and woken her up, despite the shadows lurking everywhere. 

She’s humming a lullaby now, without words. 

A week before, he’s started having dreams about his Games, and they won’t _stop._

\--- 

Once he makes twenty, it doesn’t hurt at all. 

It’s almost nice.

\---

He’s a hundred years old.


End file.
